Doctor Svenson was silent. The Contessa exhaled again, wearily.
“Being obliged in any way is hateful. Very well. I have not seen Elöise Dujong since the train yard at Karthe. Miss Temple traveled with me. I left her quite alive, free to re-enter her cocoon of respectable hotels and tractable fiancés. Now, will you please sit down?”
HE KNEW the Contessa to be the worst of women, and yet whenever she spoke, even if he knew it to be a honey spun of nightshade, it was as if her candor was meant for him alone. He stuffed the kindling into what remained of the embers. Could she truly not have been at the cottage? The Contessa uncorked the cider, took an unhurried pull, and held out the bottle. He felt the dizzy throb at the back of his skull and drank, reflexively wiping the bottle with his sleeve—at which the Contessa chuckled. She pushed across the barge-master's dinner: a half loaf of coarse brown bread; a block of cheese, its edges scumbled with mold; and perhaps six inches of blood sausage. The Contessa raised her eyebrows with a knowing expectation. He looked at the sausage, then met her eyes again and felt his face grow warm.
“You have the fellow's knife, I believe,” she said.
“Ah.”
Doctor Svenson cut sausage and cheese for them both and then returned the clasp knife to his pocket. The Contessa piled a slice of each onto a torn hank of bread and took a small, estimatory bite.
“A bit of mustard would do well.” She shrugged. “Or caviar on ice with vodka—but what can one do?”
They ate in silence—like Svenson, the Contessa was evidently starving. But it was enough to simply watch her chew, or her nimble fingers pluck together each mouthful, or the action of her swallowing throat—the display of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza as a human machine. While this brought her status in his mind as an especially splendid creature somewhat down to earth, it also—combined with the lines lack of sleep and comfort had sketched around her eyes, the dull bloody color of her unpainted lips, and the untucked strands of black hair that fell about her face—made her seem so much more a palpable woman. He sawed apart the rest of the meat and cheese and smiled as she snatched the slices away as they appeared, marveling at how effortlessly companionable she had become. Doctor Svenson caught himself staring at her hands. The pain in his head had eased, he realized, only to be replaced by a growing, embarrassing ardor. He reached for the bottle and shifted what had grown to an uncomfortable position, drank, and groped to change the subject in his own internal conversation.
“WHAT DID you think of the glass card?” he asked. “It was taken from my pockets. Don't tell me you didn't look into it.”
“Why should I tell you that?” She reached for the bottle, drank, and set it down. “I think she does her best to warn you.”
“Why?”
“Because she is an idiot.”
“You mean she wants to save my life.”
The Contessa shrugged. “If she cared for you truly, if she had a scruple of genuine sympathy for your soul, she would have instead provided you with the experience of Arthur Trapping having his beastly way with her on the floor of his children's schoolroom. You would have felt their pleasure—it would have aroused you, but sickened you even more. No doubt your skin crawls to think of it, of them, those little chairs, the room smelling first of notebooks and chalk, but then more pungent, the air thick with her—the barnyard grunting, the secretions—my goodness, you must know each by its Latin name!”
She stopped at once, her eyes innocently round. “If Mrs. Dujong cared for you, she would have done her level best to drive you away by whatever means might be at hand. She has instead attempted to explain… and thus sent along your own death warrant.”
“Do you think so?”
“Listen to yourself defend her! The only question is whether she did so knowingly or is stupid. In either case, again—really, Doctor—pah!”
SVENSON HAD no answer. The blue card had been placed in his pocket by Elöise… but what justification could it possibly offer? How other to read the attack in her uncle's cottage save as the tipping point where she had been forced to reveal her true allegiance? But why should he trust the Contessa? He glanced once more toward the shadows where the barge-master's cooling body lay hidden.
“Is it likely we will receive visitors from the large building down the road?”
“That depends on whether the fellow whose dinner we eat was merely a guard to mind the barge or someone with a task, the non-doing of which will draw notice.” She reached for a last slice of cheese. “One reason to maintain the fire of course is to maintain the illusion of his continued presence.”
“And if I had not arrived?”
“But you did arrive, Doctor.”
“You credit the notion of destiny, then?”
The Contessa smiled. “I credit the need to face facts. I am not one to entertain phantasms when I can entertain the real.”
“The objects on the blanket told you they had encountered me.”
“Why should I care?”
“Why indeed?”
Doctor Svenson reached for the cider. The bottle was two-thirds gone. “And what is this building? Surely it is your object in Parchfeldt Park.”
“To so arrantly reveal your ignorance, Doctor Svenson—it shows bad form.”
“Rubbish yourself, madame.” Could mere cider be going to his head so quickly? “Do you think I cannot see the stiffness in your right shoulder?”
“I assure you, I am quite well.”
“You have taken the bottle each time with your left hand, even when I have placed it much nearer the right. If you have been injured, I should see what I can do—it will only make it easier for you to take my life when you finally decide.”
“Or for you to take mine directly.”
“If that were a worry, you would not be here.”
In a sudden afterthought to his logic, Svenson realized that he had taken a blow square to the right side of his head, from a woman directly behind him—which meant she must have used the full force of her arm, which strongly suggested his assailant had used her right arm. It could not have been the Contessa at the cottage—just as the Contessa could not have extricated Robert Vandaariff from Harschmort. But if the woman he had glimpsed next to Elöise had taken Robert Vandaariff from Harschmort, along with the Comte's paintings… at once the Doctor suddenly knew he had been knocked into the wardrobe by Trapping's wife, Charlotte.
The Contessa glanced to the road, then back to Doctor Svenson, her violet eyes inhabited by a curious gleam. As if she had come to a wicked decision, she reached into a canvas bag behind her and came out with a bottle and a rag.
“Such professional concern. You must give me a moment to undo my dress…”
HE COULD see the wound would scar. At another time he would have certainly stitched the gash together, but here he soaked it with the alcohol.
“This was not from the glass,” he said, as the Contessa flinched— not from pain, but from the cold drips that ran beneath her dress to the small of her back.
“Not from Francis, you mean?” Her hair hung over her face to provide a clearer view of the wound. “No. I had the misfortune of passing through a window.”
“A few inches higher and it would have cut your throat.”
She had removed her right arm from the dress, and the purple silk bunched in a rustling diagonal, revealing the Contessa's corset and a good deal of her body—even paler for the blackness of her hair.